a foggy notion

As a member of the 21st Century I have to except certain things. I can contact people all over the globe almost instantaneously. I can rabbit on about my thoughts and publish them for the world to see. And, if I produced the right type of photograph I could sell this for a relatively large amount of money.

Each of these things is astounding in its own right and equally we would have struggled to do any of them  in 1968. With regards to the first two pronouncements this comes as little surprise. But with the final one this may not be so obvious. Nonetheless though it is fairly accurate to say that in 1968 art photography was not a widely recognised practice and proponents of this art form stood to gain little financial reward from it.  

In a round about way this brings us to the topic of todays post: photography in Land Art. 

Isolated Mass, Circumflex 1968

In 1968 Michael Heizer travelled in to the Nevada Desert and cut a curvaceous channel in the ground. That we know anything about this at all is down to the photographs taken of this intervention into nature. From the photograph we get the rudimentary idea of Heizer's work and the basic form it took. 

Isolated Mass, Circumflex is one example of the type of work that would come to be grouped under the banner of Land or Environmental Art. Protagonists such as Oppenheim, Haacke, Smithson rejected the traditional role of the artist and sought to explore new places and new materials. There was a sense that art was being liberated from its traditional confines of the studio and gallery. Now it could exist anywhere and be made of anything. Heizer himself had high hopes for such work and elaborated on its potential in idealistic terms:

'one aspect of earth orientation is that works circumvent the galleries and the artist has no sense of the commercial or the utilitarian...One of the implications of Earth Art might be to remove completely the commodity status of a work of art'

For contemporary audiences such a statement seems tremendously naive. The complete removal of arts commodity status has far from been acheived and all manner of work still sells for huge sums. Land Art is no exception. The photographs taken of these interventions act to commodify what Heizer felt could be un-commodifiable. They take what is site-specific and temporary and give it material form. What's more it is a form that can be easily reporduced and circulated to a wide audience. So while the initial intervention is hard to commodify the resulting documents more than make up for this.

But before we condemn this statement as totally naive we must remember the status of the photograph in 1968. This was not a medium that could be sold for huge sums and the art market had not conferred financial value onto the medium. When Heizer says the commodity status could be removed this is because from his point of view, and of the period in which he was working, the photograph was not a prized object.

Ironically it was work produced around this time that began to demonstrate the art value of the photograph and pave the way for the fantastic prices photographs fetch today. But this was still to come and as far as Heizer was concerned the photograph was a relatively worthless object in 1968.

All this indicates that judging the work and statements from artists has to incorporate more than just the hard facts. We must broaden our consideration to think about the socio-economic context they worked in; contemporary theories in art and the nature of the art market. All these things shape an artists production and if we neglect to explore the influence such things have then we risk being naive ourselves.